"False"
Skip to content
printicon
Main menu hidden.
Published: 2017-04-20

Design students visualise children’s ideas for a disconnected future

NEWS What kind of communication devices are needed in a world where all electronic communication is out of order? Twelve ten year old children from Hällsbo school, a special school in Umeå, gave students at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, this task. On Monday 24 April the students present their results.

Umeå Institute of Design, UID, has just completed a collaboration project with Kulturverket in Umeå Municipality and Hällsbo School. The short activity was part of Kulturverket’s long running project ”Kids Tell Pros What To Do”, in which selected children from schools in Umeå get their creative ideas reinterpreted by professional in different fields. 

This year a class of twelve kids from Hällsbo School, specialised in children with difficulties to communicate, was tasked with the challenge to create message-carrying vehicles for a hypothetical context in which all other means of communication would be out of order. 

The 10-year-old kids drew, modelled and described their vehicle creations and this material was then distributed among twelve international master students attending the Transportation Design programme at UID. 

As part of their Storytelling in Design course, each master student was asked to create a short narrative inspired by one of the vehicles. Fundamentals of storytelling theory were applied and each narrative was then visualised in the form of storyboards. The last step of the assignment was to choose a key moment of the story and visualise it by including key elements like characters, environment, and naturally – the advanced vehicles needed to carry out quite special communication tasks. 

On April 24 09.00-10.00 the children from Hällsbo School will visit Umeå Institute of Design to see the result of the exercise and meet the students who worked in the creative assignment.

“It will be quite an emotional moment”, says programme director Demian Horst, who was responsible for the course. “Our students were really looking forward to this activity, had an enjoyable time working on the assignments and the results express how engaging the pedagogical format really is. Now we hope that the Hällsbo kids will also enjoy the outcome as much as we do”.

Time: Monday 24 April 09.00-10.00
Location: Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå Arts campus, Östra Strandgatan 30, Umeå.

For more information, please contact:

Demian Horst, programme director, Master’s programme in transportation design, Umeå Institute of DesignPhone: +46907869782
E-mail: demian.horst@umu.se

Anna Parry, KulturverketPhone: +46706779809
E-mail: anna@thegoodisgood.com

Editor: Anna-Lena Lindskog